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Friday, April 20, 2012

Growth Around National Parks

There should be a protocol established in which a halo is created with
quasi municipal status whose role is to wisely manage the lands inside the
halo.Otherwise badly situated
development will promote conflicts and additional ill begotten decisions.

Otherwise, these parks are destinations that do support the provision
of services and economic expansion to some degree is inevitable.

The main challenge is to allow natural flowing animal corridors into
the parks for some fraying at the borders of the parks.Once that is settled, it becomes a numbers
management task.There is only room for
so many bears and wolves and elk and deer for that matter.

Comparing growth around
Yellowstone, Glacier and other national parks

by Staff Writers

Bozeman MT (SPX) Apr 10, 2012

Yellowstone, Glacier, the
Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park were among the wildland-protected
parks. As such, they share some common issues, Hansen said. The parks may
experience increasing conflicts between humans and wildlife as private land is
developed outside their boundaries, for example. Administrators may have to
work to maintain or, potentially, restore top predators to their ecosystems.

The land around Yellowstone and Glacier
national parks might look like it's filling up with people and houses, but it's
nothing compared to the rate of development around some other U.S. national
parks, according to a new Montana State University study.

While population densities rose 246 percent
around Yellowstone/Grand Teton and 210 percent around Glacier between 1940 and
2000, they surged 3,092 percent around the Mojave National Preserve in
California, 2,962 percent around the Colorado River parks and almost 2,473
percent around the Everglades National Park/Big Cypress National Park in
Florida.

While housing densities grew 13.2 percent
around Yellowstone and 11.4 percent around Glacier, they increased 75.6 percent
around the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in California.

"We are quite impressed locally with the
increase in density of rural homes around both parks and with the density of
people that live around the ecosystem, but when compared to 57 parks, we are
quite on the lower end of that development," MSU ecologist Andrew Hansen
said of Yellowstone and Glacier.

After conducting the country's first study
into population density and land use changes in the ecosystems around U.S.
national parks, Hansen and lead author Cory Davis published their findings in
"Ecological Applications," a journal published by the Ecological Society
of America. Davis, a former biologist at Glacier National Park, is an MSU
graduate student in ecology and works as a research associate in the College of
Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. Hansen is a professor
in MSU's Department of Ecology.

The MSU study - which complemented a UM study
on climate change - focused on 57 national parks in the lower 48 states and
found that population densities around the parks rose an average of 224 percent
between 1940 and 2000, while housing densities grew 329 percent. Those
surprising increases are considerably higher than the national increases in
population and housing densities in the United States during the same time.

At the same time, the
researchers noted that the increases were averages. Changes differed widely
among the 57 parks in their study.

"Parks largely in the East like Great
Smoky Mountain changed dramatically from being surrounded mostly by forests and
farms to cities, suburbs and ranchettes," Hansen said. "This was also
true at a moderate level for some western parks such as Olympic and Rocky
Mountain. Others, such as Yellowstone and Bighorn Canyon, that we locally think
are changing rapidly, had very slow rates of growth relative to the national
rates."

In the course of their work, the researchers
divided the 57 national parks into five categories according to types and rates
of land use change around the parks. Twenty-five parks were classified as
wildland-protected. Sixteen were "wildland developable." Five were
agricultural. Eight were exurban. Three were urban.

Yellowstone, Glacier, the Grand Canyon and
Yosemite National Park were among the wildland-protected parks. As such, they
share some common issues, Hansen said. The parks may experience increasing
conflicts between humans and wildlife as private land is developed outside
their boundaries, for example. Administrators may have to work to maintain or,
potentially, restore top predators to their ecosystems. They may be concerned
about resource extraction disrupting migration corridors, wintering grounds or
key ecological processes if federal or state mandates allow mining, logging and
livestock grazing near the parks. Many of the private lands around wildland
parks are protected by conservation easements and support wildlife, such as
bison on Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch near Yellowstone.

Approximately 35 percent of the land around
Yellowstone and 45 percent of the land around Glacier is private, Hansen said.
Of that private land, 75 percent remains undeveloped. Tribal land is included
in private land.

Each category in the study faces unique
challenges, so the researchers hope that park administrators in the same
category will band together to find solutions, Hansen said.

For their study, Hansen and Davis selected
large national parks that were located in the lower 48 states and had
significant natural resources. They excluded parks that were primarily
surrounded by water and parks that were managed for their cultural resources.
Their final selections represent a wide distribution of climate and land uses.
Those parks are managed primarily for natural values, biodiversity or
recreation.

Davis and Hansen then looked at development on
the land outside the parks. The size of those "protected-area centered
ecosystems," or PACES, was determined by what was needed to sustain the
species and ecological processes present within the parks.

Davis and Hansen conducted their study with
statistics from the U.S. Census between1940 through 2000, the latest year that
Census figures were available while the study was being conducted. They updated
their findings with 2007 estimates of population and housing densities.

The researchers also visited several national
parks and worked with park administrators and staff for their study. Among them
was John Gross, climate change ecologist in the National Park Service's
Inventory and Monitoring Program.

"I was impressed with the thoughtfulness
of their analyses and with the clarity of the presentation of results,"
Gross wrote by email.

"This study greatly expanded the
estimation of the PACEs, and parks have found these useful to help identify
scientifically credible and defensible areas for monitoring, identifying
conservation issues, and for other planning purposes," Gross continued.
"We are using the PACEs as the basis for defining study areas as we
further examine threats to park resources and try to anticipate actions that
might prevent degradation or loss of park resources due to activities outside
parks."

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18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.